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Home , Any Human Heart, Carmen Maria Machado, Ian McEwan

The Summit: Upper School Reading Challenge 2019/20

M A R L B O R O U G H C O L L E G E E V E R E S T R E A D I N G C H A L L E N G E How does the challenge work?

You need to read 5 books from this booklet by the end of Summer Term 2020. Every time you finish a book from the list, come and talk to Library staff about the book and we’ll record your progress, and give you a stamp.

Once you have conquered the Everest Reading Challenge and collected five stamps, you will join your fellow students on an end of year trip to Pizza Hut & Cineworld. It’s like a loyalty card, with a pizza and movies reward!

Stamps Collected:

What’s in this book?

Look out for these icons which will tell you the main themes of the books in this challenge:

Masculinity/ Post- Social Class Male Identity Colonialism

Femininity/ Female Comedy Time, Memory Identity

Drugs, Sexuality Gothic, Horror Debauchery, Hedonism

Relationships, War Satire Families

Monsters, Dystopia, Post- Magical Question of Apocalypse Realism Evil

Fiction in Mental Health Race Translation

Morality, Growing Up, Ethics, Classic, Bildungsroman Philosophy, Modern Classic

Religion

Death, Grief, Pastoral Historical Bereavement

Americanah/Chimanda Ngozi Adiche Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion—for each other and for their homeland.

Themes: Race, Migration, Culture Clash, Belonging, Romance

Suggested companion texts:  Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe  No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe  Family Life by Akhil Sharma  The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Power/Naomi Alderman All over the world women are discovering they have the power. With a flick of the fingers they can inflict terrible pain - even death. Suddenly, every man on the planet finds they have lost control. The day of the girls has arrived - but where will it end?

Exploring concepts of gender, hierarchy and power, The Power is an ingenious and masterfully crafted piece of feminist as well as a searing indictment of our contemporary world.

Themes: Gender, Power, Sexuality, Religious Extremism

Suggested companion texts:  The Handmaid’s Tale by  The Bloody Chamber by  The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch  Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall  The Children of Men by P.D. James  The Crucible by Arthur Miller  Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy and Margaret Atwood Brick Lane/Monica Ali Still in her teenage years, Nazneen finds herself in an arranged marriage with a disappointed man who is twenty years older. Away from the mud and heat of her Bangladeshi village, home is now a cramped flat in a high-rise block in London's East End. Nazneen knows not a word of English, and is forced to depend on her husband. But unlike him she is practical and wise, and befriends a fellow Asian girl Razia, who helps her understand the strange ways of her adopted new British home.

A superb novel about isolation, immigration and the mixing of cultures.

Themes: Migration, Race, Belonging, Family & Romantic Relationships

Suggested companion texts:  by  The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri  White Teeth by  Poetry of Kamala Das, Benjamin Zephaniah, Ruth Padel, Jackie Kay and Warsan Shire

Money / This is the story of John Self, consumer extraordinaire. Rolling around New York and London, he makes deals, spends wildly and does reckless movie-world business, all the while grabbing everything he can to sate his massive appetites: alcohol, tobacco, pills, pornography, a mountain of junk food and more. Ceaselessly inventive and thrillingly savage, this is a tale of life lived without restraint; of money, the terrible things it can do and the disasters it can precipitate.

A novel of wit and satire aimed at questioning our relationship with money and consumerism. Dazzling prose and caustic wit propel this novel along a course that pokes holes in what defines our identities and the human condition as a whole.

Themes: Drugs, Masculinity, Hedonism, Money

Suggested companion texts:  American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis  Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson  Poetry of Alan Ginsberg The Handmaid’s Tale/Margaret Atwood Set in twenty-first century America, Atwood depicts a society that has grown both culturally and physically sterile under a religious fundamentalist dictatorship. Only a small number of women are still fertile, and these so-called ‘handmaids’ are both prized for and reduced to their reproductive function, being assigned to wealthy and powerful men in order to bear their children. The story focuses on one of these handmaids, Offred, and her tale encompasses both life before the rise of fundamentalism, her growing resistance to the regime, and her attempted escape. A classic feminist exploration of sexual politics, set in a dystopian future world.

Themes: Gender, Power, Sexuality, Religious Extremism

Suggested companion texts:  The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood  The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter  The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch  Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall  The Children of Men by P.D. James  The Crucible by Arthur Miller  Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy and Margaret Atwood

If Beale Street Could Talk/James Baldwin Harlem, the black soul of New York City, in the era of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. The narrator of Baldwin's novel is Tish nineteen, and pregnant. Her lover Fonny, father of her child, is in jail accused of rape. Flashbacks from their love affair are woven into the compelling struggle of two families to win justice for Fonny. To this love story James Baldwin brings a spare and impassioned intensity, charging it with universal resonance and power.

'If Beale Street Could Talk affirms not only love between a man and a woman, but love of a type that is dealt with only rarely in contemporary fiction - that between members of a family' Joyce Carol Oates

Themes: Race, Civil Rights, 1970s America, Family, Romantic Relationships

Suggested companion texts:  A Passage to India by E.M. Forster  by Ian McEwan  The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison  Poetry of Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou The Wasp Factory/ Iain Banks “Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through.”

A dark and twisted Gothic horror story, this book is impossible to put down.

Not one for the faint of heart!

Themes: Evil, Sexuality, Gender, Morality, Father/Son Relationships

Suggested companion texts:  The Collector by John Fowles  The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris  The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Sense of an Ending/ Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex- hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life.

Now Tony is retired. He's had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He's certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer's letter is about to prove.

A book about memory and how we construct our pasts and the people in them.

Themes: Memory, Time, Relationships, Fate, Intertwining Life Paths

Suggested companion texts:  A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving  by  Howard’s End by E.M.. Forster Oroonoko/ Aphra Behn When Prince Oroonoko's passion for the virtuous Imoinda arouses the jealousy of his grandfather, the lovers are cast into slavery and transported from Africa to the colony of Surinam. Oroonoko's noble bearing soon wins the respect of his English captors, but his struggle for freedom brings about his destruction.

Oroonoko was inspired by Aphra Behn’s travels in Africa and her romantic view of the people as ‘noble savages’. The novel also grapples with Behn’s ambiguous attitudes towards African slavery.

Themes: Slavery, Race, Colonialism

Suggested companion texts:  Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe  Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad  Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe  Beloved by Toni Morrison  Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi  Othello by William Shakespeare

Any Human Heart/ Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary, but Logan Mountstuart's - lived from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century - contains more than its fair share of both. As a writer who finds inspiration with Hemingway in and Virginia Woolf in London, as a spy recruited by and betrayed in the war and as an art-dealer in '60s New York, Logan mixes with the movers and shakers of his times. But as a son, friend, lover and husband, he makes the same mistakes we all do in our search for happiness. Here, then, is the story of a life lived to the full - and a journey deep into a very human heart.

Themes: Relationships, Changing Self,

Suggested companion texts:  Orlando by Virginia Woolf  A Handful of Dust by  Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov  Atonement by Ian McEwan  The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce A Clockwork Orange/Anthony Burgess Fifteen-year-old Alex doesn’t just like ultraviolence—he also enjoys rape, drugs and Beethoven’s Ninth. He and his gang rampage through a dystopian future, hunting for thrills. But when Alex finds himself at the mercy of the state and the ministrations of Dr Brodsky, the government psychologist, he discovers that fun is no longer the order of the day… Dark, forbidding, funny with a language that is bent and twisted, Clockwork Orange is an ingenious work of fiction that disturbs and delights in equal measure.

This book has graphic content that may not be suitable for some readers.

Themes: Hedonism, Satire, Masculinity, Dystopia

Suggested companion texts:  The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger  by Ian McEwan  The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton  Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell  Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

The Miniaturist/Jessie Burton On an autumn day in 1686, eighteen-year-old Nella Oortman knocks at the door of a grand house in the wealthiest quarter of . She has come from the country to begin a new life as the wife of illustrious merchant trader Johannes Brandt, but instead she is met by his sharp-tongued sister, Marin. Only later does Johannes appear and present her with an extraordinary wedding gift: a cabinet-sized replica of their home. It is to be furnished by an elusive miniaturist, whose tiny creations mirror their real-life counterparts in unexpected ways . . .

Beautiful, intoxicating and filled with heart-pounding suspense, The Miniaturist is a magnificent story of love and obsession, betrayal and retribution, appearance and truth.

Themes: Marriage, Fate, 17th Century Holland

Suggested companion texts:  Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier  The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant  Leonardo’s Swans by Karen Essex  Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach Breakfast at Tiffany’s/Truman Capote Immortalised by Audrey Hepburn's sparkling performance in the 1961 film of the same name, Breakfast at Tiffany's is Truman Capote's timeless portrait of tragicomic cultural icon Holly Golightly.

It's New York in the 1940s, where the martinis flow from cocktail hour till breakfast at Tiffany's. And nice girls don't, except, of course, for Holly Golightly: glittering socialite traveller, generally upwards, sometimes sideways and once in a while - down. Pursued by to Salvatore 'Sally' Tomato, the Mafia sugar-daddy doing life in Sing Sing and 'Rusty' Trawler, the blue-chinned, cuff-shooting millionaire man about women about town, Holly is a fragile eyeful of tawny hair and turned-up nose, a heart-breaker, a perplexer, a traveller, a tease. She is irrepressibly 'top banana in the shock deparment', and one of the shining flowers of American fiction.

Themes: Isolation, Dreams, Romance, Friendship, Transience

Suggested companion texts:  Gentleman Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos  The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald  Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf  The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy  The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Tinker, Sailor, Soldier, Spy/John Le Carre The man he knew as "Control" is dead, and the young Turks who forced him out now run the Circus. But George Smiley isn't quite ready for retirement—especially when a pretty, would-be defector surfaces with a shocking accusation: a Soviet mole has penetrated the highest level of British Intelligence. Relying only on his wits and a small, loyal cadre, Smiley recognizes the hand of Karla—his Moscow Centre nemesis—and sets a trap to catch the traitor.

Themes: , Espionage

Suggested companion texts:  The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon  From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming  Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene  Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon The Bloody Chamber/Angela Carter The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is a titillating series of dark, sensual and fantastical stories, inspired by well-known fairy tales and folklore. Dissatisfied with the unrealistic portrayal of women in these legendary fables, Carter turns them on their head, introducing subversively dark, sensual and gothic narratives. Breathing new and unexpected life into favourite childhood characters such as Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard and Beauty and the Beast, Carter shocks, seduces and amuses the listener with her unique, iconic and surrealist reimagining.

Themes: Sexuality, The Gothic, Horror, Fairy-Tale Retellings

Suggested companion texts:  The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood  The Power by Naomi Alderman  The Girl with No Hands by Angela Slatter  Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado  Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole  Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe

The Death of Grass/John Christopher The Chung-Li virus has devastated Asia, wiping out the rice crop and leaving riots and mass starvation in its wake. The rest of the world looks on with concern, though safe in the expectation that a counter-virus will be developed any day. Then Chung-Li mutates and spreads. Wheat, barley, oats, rye: no grass crop is safe, and global famine threatens. In Britain, where green fields are fast turning brown, the Government lies to its citizens, devising secret plans to preserve the lives of a few at the expense of the many. Getting wind of what’s in store, John Custance and his family decide they must abandon their London home, and so they begin the long trek across a country fast descending into barbarism, where the law of the gun prevails, and the civilized values they once took for granted become the price they must pay if they are to survive.

Themes: Post-Apocalypse, Gender, Sexuality, Morality, Cold War, Relationships

Suggested companion texts:  The Road by Cormac McCarthy  The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham  Children of Men by P.D. James  Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel /J.M. Coetzee After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding.

For a time, his daughter's influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship.

Themes: Post-Colonialism, Guilt, Remorse, Romantic Relationships

Suggested companion texts:  The Imposer by Dalmon Galgut  The Island by Aldous Huxley  Master Harold and the Boys by Athol Fugard

The Vet’s Daughter/Barbara Comyns Alice Rowlands lives with a glowering father ‘like a disappointed thunderstorm’, a fast-fading mother and a beastly menagerie in a dark house in 1930s Battersea. With her mother’s death, life becomes almost intolerable for Alice, whose father treats her as a slave. The kind ‘Blinkers’, the vet’s assistant, arranges for her to live with his mother in the country.

There, Alice revels in the beauty of nature and falls head over heels for Nicholas the lovely boy who takes her skating, motoring, and smiles at her. But Nicholas has other fish to fry, and Alice is forced to fall back on a talent for rising above her ...

Themes: The Gothic, Gender, Domestic Violence, Sexuality

Suggested companion texts:  The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath  Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte  That Satanic Verses by  We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Heart of Darkness/Joseph Conrad Based on Conrad’s own experiences with a Belgian trading company in the Congo, Heart of Darkness is an incisive exploration of Western colonialism in Africa. It follows the story of Marlow, a sailor who takes passage on a series of European steamboats, journeying into the interior of Africa, which Marlow describes as “a place of darkness.” However the violent exploitation of the African people that Marlow witnesses along the way, lead us to question the nature and source of this darkness, and reveals the illegitimacy and unrestrained brutality of the colonial enterprise.

Themes: Race, Colonialism, Madness, Masculinity

Suggested companion texts:  Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe  Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie  Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala  A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipul  Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee  by

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin/Louis de Bernieres It is 1941 and Captain Antonio Corelli, a young Italian officer, is posted to the Greek island of Cephallonia as part of the occupying forces. At first he is ostracised by the locals, but as a conscientious but far from fanatical soldier, whose main aim is to have a peaceful war, he proves in time to be civilised, humorous - and a consummate musician.

When the local doctor's daughter's letters to her fiancé - and members of the underground - go unanswered, the working of the eternal triangle seems inevitable. But can this fragile love survive as a war of bestial savagery gets closer and the lines are drawn between invader and defender?

Themes: War, Romantic Relationships, Music, Totalitarianism, Morality, Memory

Suggested companion texts:  Atonement by Ian McEwan  by Sebastian Faulks  by  Regeneration by  All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque The Man in the High Castle/Philip K Dick Imagine if the Axis powers had won the Second World War. Imagine if America had been carved in two, one half going to the Nazi Reich and the other to the Japanese empire. This is the world of The Man in the High Castle.

Set against this backdrop a small group of resistance cells work to undermine the occupying forces, and a mysterious author releases a book that questions if any of this ever really happened…

One of the best science fiction books ever written and a must for anybody interested in WW2 history.

Themes: Alternative History, Politics, Power, Cold War, Totalitarianism

Suggested companion texts:  Fatherland by Robert Harris  Dominion by CJ Sansom  Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell  Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Great Expectations/Charles Dickens Great Expectations follows the journey of its narrator, Pip, an orphan with dreams of escaping the household of his abusive older sister and becoming a respectable gentleman. Along the way he is accosted by an escaped convict, and acquires an eccentric benefactor in the form of Miss Havisham, a woman who has not taken off her wedding dress since her fiancé left her at the altar years earlier, and who has her own sinister plans for both Pip and her daughter Estella. One of Dicken’s most well-loved novels, with a host of memorable characters and dollops of intrigue, fun, peril, redemption and love triumphing in the end.

Themes: Bildungsroman, Class, Victorian England, Relationships

Suggested companion texts:  Mill on the Floss by George Eliot  Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson  Fingersmith by Sarah Waters  Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray  Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe The Mill on the Floss/George Eliot Tragic and moving, The Mill on the Floss is a novel of grand passions and tormented lives. As the rebellious Maggie's fiery spirit and imaginative nature bring her into bitter conflict with her narrow provincial family, most painfully with her beloved brother Tom, their fates are played out on an epic scale. George Eliot drew on her own frustrated rural upbringing to create one of the great novels of childhood, and one of literature's most unforgettable heroines.

A novel about growing up, defying familial expectations and forging your own path, but does it all end happily ever after for Maggie Tulliver?...

Themes: Drowning, Relationships, Bildungsroman, Gender

Suggested companion texts:  Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy  Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte  Vilette by Charlotte Bronte  Orange Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

The Invisible Man/Ralph Ellinson Ralph Ellison's blistering and impassioned first novel tells the extraordinary story of a man invisible 'simply because people refuse to see me'. Published in 1952 when American society was in the cusp of immense change, the powerfully depicted adventures of Ellison's invisible man - from his expulsion from a Southern college to a terrifying Harlem race riot - go far beyond the story of one individual to give voice to the experience of an entire generation of black Americans.

Themes: Race, Civil Rights, 1950s America

Suggested companion texts:  If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin  The Help by Kathryn Stockett  Native Son by Richard Wright  To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee  Poetry of Langston Hughes The Virgin Suicides/Jeffrey Eugenides This is the story of the five Lisbon sisters – beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the entire neighbourhood.

The boys that once loved them from afar are now grown men, determined to understand a tragedy that has always defied explanation. For still, the question remains – why did all five of the Lisbon girls take their own lives?

This hypnotic and unforgettable novel treats adolescent love and death with haunting sensitivity and dark humour, and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time.

Themes: Isolation, Gender, Coming of Age, Mortality, Mental Health, Sexuality

Suggested companion texts:  We The Animals by Justin Torres  The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks  by Margaret Atwood  White Oleander by Janet Fitch  The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Birdsong/Sebastian Faulks A novel of overwhelming emotional power, Birdsong is a story of love, death, sex and survival. Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman, arrives in Amiens in northern France in 1910 to stay with the Azaire family, and falls in love with unhappily married Isabelle. But, with the world on the brink of war, the relationship falters, and Stephen volunteers to fight on the Western Front. His love for Isabelle forever engraved on his heart, he experiences the unprecedented horrors of that conflict - from which neither he nor any reader of this book can emerge unchanged.

Themes: Warfare, Romantic Relationships, Grief, Trauma

Suggested companion texts:  Regeneration by Pat Barker  A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway  A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry  The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West  Poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Charles Hamilton Sorley Howard’s End/ E.M. Forster A heartbreaking and provocative tale of three families at the beginning of the twentieth century: the rich Wilcoxes, the gentle, idealistic Schlegels and the lower-middle class Basts. As the Schlegel sisters try desperately to help the Basts and educate the close- minded Wilcoxes, the families are drawn together in love, lies and death.

This novel shows Forster’s inner most thoughts on the changes in the world around him. His fears over modernisation and the loss of a simpler way of life. This novel is regarded as his best, and is not one to be missed!

Themes: Society, Class, Relationships, Pastoral

Suggested companion texts:  Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy  On Beauty by Zadie Smith  Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

The Collector/John Fowles Withdrawn, uneducated and unloved, Frederick collects butterflies and takes photographs. He is obsessed with a beautiful stranger, the art student Miranda. When he wins the pools he buys a remote Sussex house and calmly abducts Miranda, believing she will grow to love him in time. Alone and desperate, Miranda must struggle to overcome her own prejudices and contempt if she is understand her captor, and so gain her freedom.

Themes: Evil, Class, Sexuality, Captivity

Suggested companion texts:  Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov  The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks  American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis  by Ian McEwan  The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan The Beach/Alex Garland Backpacker Richard lands in East Asia in search of an earthly utopia. In Thailand, he is given a map promising an unknown island, a secluded beach - and a new way of life. What Richard finds when he gets there is breath-taking: more extraordinary, more frightening than his wildest dreams.

A compelling adventure story, with shades of Lord of the Flies. A secret community of travellers and backpackers set up on a secluded Thai island and it seems like paradise, but are they alone and how long can will it be before things start to fall apart?

Themes: Hedonism, Escapism, Conflict, Social Breakdown, Utopia/Dystopia

Suggested companion texts:  The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux  Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad  The Backpacker by John Harris  The Tempest by William Shakespeare

The Reluctant Fundamentalist/Mohsin Hamid “Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard. I am a lover of America…”

So speaks the mysterious stranger at a Lahore cafe as dusk settles. Invited to join him for tea, you learn his name and what led this speaker of immaculate English to seek you out. For he is more worldly than you might expect; better travelled and better educated. He knows the West better than you do. And as he tells you his story, of how he embraced the Western dream -- and a Western woman -- and how both betrayed him, so the night darkens. Then the true reason for your meeting becomes abundantly clear...

Themes: Religious Extremism, Culture Clash, Bildungsroman

Suggested companion texts:  The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini  The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy  Guapa by Saleem Haddad  Call it Sleep by Henry Roth  Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand Tess of the D'Urbervilles/Thomas Hardy When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D’Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her ‘cousin’ Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love and salvation; but Tess must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope of a peaceful future. With its sensitive depiction of the wronged Tess and with its powerful criticism of social convention, Tess of the D'Urbervilles is one of the most moving and poetic of Hardy’s Novels.

Themes: Gender, Sexuality, Pastoral, Class

Suggested companion texts:  Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys  The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood  Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Catch-22/Joseph Heller Set in the closing months of World War II, this is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. His real problem is not the enemy - it is his own army which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. If Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions then he is caught in Catch-22: if he flies he is crazy, and doesn't have to; but if he doesn't want to he must be sane and has to. That's some catch...

Themes: Satire, War

Suggested companion texts:  Brave New World by Aldous Huxley  A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess  Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell  Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut For Whom the Bell Tolls/Ernest Hemingway High in the pine forests of the Spanish Sierra, a guerrilla band prepares to blow up a vital bridge. Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer, has been sent to handle the dynamiting. There, in the mountains, he finds the dangers and the intense comradeship of war. And there he discovers Maria, a young woman who has escaped from Franco's rebels. Like many of his novels, For Whom the Bell Tolls is one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century by one of the greatest American writers.

The best fictionalised account of the Spanish Civil War in existence. A tale of comradeship, political critique and beautiful description that will leave you a lifetime fan of Hemingway.

Themes: Spanish Civil War, Guerrilla Warfare, Masculinity, Relationships

Suggested companion texts:  Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell  Regeneration by Pat Barker  Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

The Talented Mr. Ripley/Patricia Highsmith Since his debut in 1955, Tom Ripley has evolved into the ultimate bad boy sociopath. Here, in the first Ripley novel, we are introduced to suave Tom Ripley, a young striver, newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan. A product of a broken home, branded a "sissy" by his dismissive Aunt Dottie, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley's fascination with Dickie's debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie's ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante. A dark reworking of Henry James's The Ambassadors, The Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for murder and self-invention is chronicled in four subsequent Ripley novels.

Themes: Murder, Identity, Sexuality, Psychopaths

Suggested companion texts:  The Ambassadors by Henry James  Enduring Love by Ian McEwan  The Secret History by Donna Tartt  The Collector by John Fowles  The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson Christopher and His Kind/Christopher Isherwood In November 1929, Christopher Isherwood - determined to become a 'permanent foreigner' - packed a rucksack and two suitcases and left England on a one-way ticket for Berlin. With incredible candour and wit, Isherwood recalls the decadence of Berlin's night scene and his route to sexual liberation. As the Nazis rise to power, Isherwood describes his dramatic struggle to save his partner Heinz from persecution.

Themes: Sexuality, Gender, Relationships, 1930s Berlin

Suggested companion texts:  Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson  Maurice by E.M. Forster  Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin  The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp  by

Never Let Me Go/Ishiguro An unsettling tale of a group of friends growing up in a dark reimagining of 1990s Britain. Memories of their idyllic childhood at a school in the countryside, slowly give way to the revelation of a terrible fate awaiting them. Part science fiction, and part meditation on memory and friendship, this is a dreamlike novel with a sting in the tail.

Themes: Childhood, Innocence, Boarding Schools, Grief, Fate, Genetics

Suggested companion texts:  Brave New World by Aldous Huxley  The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark The Haunting of Hill House/Shirley Jackson First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a "haunting"; Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers— and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.

Themes: Horror, The Gothic, Sexuality, Psychology

Suggested companion texts:  The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns  The Turn of the Screw by Henry James  Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin  Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe

A Brief History of Seven Killings/ In A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James combines brilliant storytelling with his unrivalled skills of characterization and meticulous eye for detail to forge an enthralling novel of dazzling ambition and scope.

On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert to ease political tensions in Kingston, seven gunmen stormed the singer’s house, machine guns blazing. The attack wounded Marley, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Little was officially released about the gunmen, but much has been whispered, gossiped and sung about in the streets of West Kingston. Rumors abound regarding the assassins’ fates, and there are suspicions that the attack was politically motivated.

Themes: Music, Political Thriller, Assassination, Corruption, 1970s Jamaica

Suggested companion texts:  The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carré  American Pastoral by Philip Roth  Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh  Yardie by Victor Headley Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man/James Joyce Playful and experimental, James Joyce's autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a vivid portrayal of emotional and intellectual development.

The portrayal of Stephen Dedalus's Dublin childhood and youth, his quest for identity through art and his gradual emancipation from the claims of family, religion and Ireland itself, is also an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce and a universal testament to the artist's 'eternal imagination'. Both an insight into Joyce's life and childhood, and a unique work of modernist fiction, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a novel of sexual awakening, religious rebellion and the essential search for voice and meaning that every nascent artist must face in order to fully come into themselves.

Themes: Identity, Religion, Growing Up, Artistic Development, Language

Suggested companion texts:  Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf  The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh  Down and Out in Paris and Berlin by George Orwell  Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood

On the Road/Jack Kerouac The book that launched a thousand road-trips, On the Road is a semi- fictionalised account of Kerouac’s travels back and forth across the United States, accompanied by a band of Beat Generation figureheads including Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Neal Cassady. Kerouac’s prose is as intoxicating as ever, as he described their hedonistic pursuit of “release or fulfilment through drink, sex, drugs and jazz.

An exploration of personal freedom, and a test of the limits of the American dream.”

Themes: American Dream, Travelling, Hedonism, Sexuality, Relationships

Suggested companion texts:  The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson  Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh  Factotum by Charles Bukowski  The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald  Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck  Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest/Ken Kesey “Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her ward in an Oregon State mental hospital with a strict and unbending routine, unopposed by her patients, who remain cowed by mind-numbing medication and the threat of electroshock therapy. But her regime is disrupted by the arrival of McMurphy - the swaggering, fun-loving trickster with a devilish grin who resolves to oppose her rules on behalf of his fellow inmates.”

A raucous, ribald novel that examines the line between sanity and madness.

Themes: Psychiatric Hospitals, Mental Health, Confinement, Masculinity

Suggested companion texts:  Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane  The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath  Catcher in the Rye by Holden Caulfield  Faces in the Water by Janet Frame

The Poisonwood Bible/Barbara Kingsolver Barbara Kingsolver's acclaimed international bestseller tells the story of an American missionary family in the Congo during a poignant chapter in African history. It spins the tale of the fierce evangelical Baptist, Nathan Price, who takes his wife and four daughters on a missionary journey into the heart of darkness of the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them to Africa all they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it - from garden seeds to the King James Bible - is calamitously transformed on African soil. Told from the perspective of the five women, this is a compelling exploration of African history, religion, family, and the many paths to redemption.

Themes: Post-Colonialism, Guilt, Justice, Religious Faith

Suggested companion texts:  Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad  Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe The Impressionist/Hari Kunzru In India, at the birth of the last century, an infant is brought howling into the world, his remarkable paleness marking him out from his brown-skinned fellows. Revered at first, he is later cast out from his wealthy home when his true parentage is revealed. So begins Pran Nath's odyssey of self-discovery - a journey that will take him from the streets of Agra, via the red light district of Bombay, to the brick cloisters of Oxford and beyond - as he struggles to understand who he really is.

Themes: Race, Identity, Class, Post-Colonialism

Suggested companion texts:  A Passage to India by E.M. Forster  Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie  by  The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri  Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys  A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

Sons and Lovers/D.H. Lawrence The marriage of Gertrude and Walter Morel has become a battleground. Repelled by her uneducated and violent husband, delicate Gertrude devotes her life to her children, especially to her sons, William and Paul - determined they will not follow their father into working down the coal mines. But conflict is evitable when Paul seeks to escape his mother's suffocating grasp through relationships with women his own age.

Taking its autobiographical inspiration from D.H. Lawrence's experience of growing up in a coal-mining town, Sons and Lovers is a vivid account of the conflict between class, family and personal desires.

Themes: Mother/Son Relationships, Servitude, Pastoral vs Modernism, Masculinity

Suggested companion texts:  Howard’s End by E.M. Forster  Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf  Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce  Middlemarch by George Eliot Small Island/Andrea Levy Hortense Joseph arrives in London from Jamaica in 1948 with her life in her suitcase, her heart broken, her resolve intact. Her husband, Gilbert Joseph, returns from the war expecting to be received as a hero, but finds his status as a black man in Britain to be second class. His white landlady, Queenie, raised as a farmer's daughter, befriends Gilbert, and later Hortense, with innocence and courage, until the unexpected arrival of her husband, Bernard, who returns from combat with issues of his own to resolve. Told in these four voices, Small Island is a courageous novel of tender emotion and sparkling wit, of crossings taken and passages lost, of shattering compassion and of reckless optimism in the face of insurmountable barriers---in short, an encapsulation of that most American of experiences: the immigrant's life.

Themes: Immigration, Race, Culture Clash, Relationships

Suggested companion texts:  White Teeth by Zadie Smith  The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon  Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys  Brick Lane by Monica Ali

Left of the Bang/Claire Lowden Left of the bang: a military term for the build-up to an explosion.

For failing concert pianist Tamsin Jarvis, the pressure is mounting. She thought she was happy with her adoring schoolteacher boyfriend Callum, but when Chris comes into their lives, that starts to change. In a few months Chris will be gone, leaving for his first tour of Afghanistan. Nothing seems to be working out the way Tamsin wants it to – in fact, she’s not even sure what it is she wants.

A funny, unflinching insider’s view on the generation born in the 1980s – who are often having much less fun than it seems – this is a Vanity Fair for our times.

Themes: Relationships, Trauma, PTSD, Sexuality, Time

Suggested companion texts:  Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov  Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys  Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray Station Eleven/Emily St John Mandel One snowy night in Toronto, famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage whilst performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a deadly virus touches down in North America.

The world will never be the same again.

Twenty years later Kirsten, an actress in the Travelling Symphony, performs Shakespeare in the settlements that have grown up since the collapse.

But then her newly hopeful world is threatened. If civilization was lost, what would you preserve? And how far would you go to protect it?

Themes: Literature, Memory, Post Apocalypse, Time, Relationships

Suggested companion texts:  The Road by Cormac McCarthy  The Death of Grass by John Christopher  The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Catherine Webb  The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta

Cormac McCarthy/No Country for Old Men Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, stumbles upon a transaction gone horribly wrong. Finding bullet-ridden bodies, several kilos of heroin, and a caseload of cash, he faces a choice - leave the scene as he found it, or cut the money and run. Choosing the latter, he knows, will change everything. And so begins a terrifying chain of events, in which each participant seems determined to answer the question that one asks another: how does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?

If you like hard-hitting books that don’t relent, then Cormac McCarthy is the author for you. Take a chance on No Country for Old Men, a novel that leaves bodies piled high in a suspense-filled game of cat and mouse.

Themes: Violence, Masculinity, Drugs, Murder, Suspense

Suggested companion texts:  Bluebird Bluebird by Attica Locke  Mystic River by Dennis Lehane  Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carré  Sanctuary by William Faulkner Atonement/Ian McEwan On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her too is Robbie Turner who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever, as Briony commits a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.

Like this book is a story about how we tell stories, do we leave all the horrible bits in? Do we change the ending if it’s not to our liking? This book is brilliantly written and a stark look at the horrors of WWI, but it is also so much more...

Themes: Memory, Sexual Assault, Trauma, Growing Up, Relationships, World War Two, Unreliable Narrator

Suggested companion texts:  Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks  Regeneration by Pat Barker  The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor  Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Love in a Cold Climate/Nancy Mitford How lovely - green velvet and silver. I call that a dream, so soft and delicious, too.' She rubbed a fold of the skirt against her cheek. 'Mine's silver lame, it smells like a bird cage when it gets hot but I do love it. Aren't you thankful evening skirts are long again?' Ah, the dresses! But oh, the monotony of the Season, with its endless run of glittering balls. Even fabulously fashionable Polly Hampton - with her startling good looks and excellent social connections - is beginning to wilt under the glare. Groomed for the perfect marriage by her mother, fearsome Lady Montdore, Polly instead scandalises society by declaring her love for her uncle 'Boy' Dougdale, the Lecherous Lecturer, and promptly eloping to France. But the consequences of this union no one could quite expect . . .

Themes: Family, High Society, Romantic Relationships

Suggested companion texts:  Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh  Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons  Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen  Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy Beloved/Toni Morrison Terrible, unspeakable things happened to Sethe at Sweet Home, the farm where she lived as a slave for so many years until she escaped to Ohio. Her new life is full of hope but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe's new home is not only haunted by the memories of her past but also by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

Themes: Race, Slavery, Nineteenth-Century America

Suggested companion texts:  Oroonoko by Aphra Behn  Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi  The Colour Purple by Alice Walker  The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead  The Long Song by Andrea Levy

The Sympathizer/Viet Thanh Nguyen It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.

Themes: Trauma, Migration, Belonging, Memory, Vietnam War, Communism

Suggested companion texts:  The Monkey Bridge by Lan Cao  Al the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr  We Should Never Meet by Aimee Phan  The Things We Do to Make it Home by Beverly Gologorsky  Dragonfish by Vu Tran The English Patient/Michael Ondaatje The final curtain is closing on the Second World War and in an abandoned Italian village. Hana, a nurse, tends to her sole remaining patient. Rescued from a burning plane, the anonymous Englishman is damaged beyond recognition and haunted by painful memories. The only clue Hana has to unlocking his past is the one thing he clung on to through the fire - a copy of The Histories by Herodotus, covered with hand-written notes detailing a tragic love affair.

Themes: Nationality and Identity, Romantic Relationships, Conflict, Trauma

Suggested companion texts:  Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières  Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks  by

Fight Club/Chuck Palahniuk Every weekend, in basements and parking lots across the country, young men with good white-collar jobs and absent fathers take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded for as long as they have to. Then they go back to those jobs with blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything. Fight Club is the invention of Tyler Durden, projectionist, waiter and dark, anarchic genius. And it's only the beginning of his plans for revenge on a world where cancer support groups have the corner on human warmth.

Themes: Violence, Masculinity, Disaffection, Unreliable Narrator

Suggested companion texts:  Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh  A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess  The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger  American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis  White Noise by Don DeLillo  Post Office by Charles Bukowski  The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks The Bell Jar/Sylvia Plath When Esther Greenwood wins an internship on a New York fashion magazine in 1953, she is elated, believing she will finally realise her dream to become a writer. But in between the cocktail parties and piles of manuscripts, Esther's life begins to slide out of control. She finds herself spiralling into serious depression as she grapples with difficult relationships and a society which refuses to take her aspirations seriously.

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath's only novel, was originally published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. The novel is partially based on Plath's own life and descent into mental illness, and has become a modern classic.

Themes: Mental Health, Sexuality, Gender

Suggested companion texts:  Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys  Girl Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen  Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood  The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman  Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

Grief is the Thing with Feathers/Max Porter In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness.

In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him.

Themes: Grief, Families, Father/Son Relationships

Suggested companion texts:  The Road by Cormac McCarthy  Falling Awake by Alice Oswold  Say Something Back by Denise Riley  Crow by Ted Hughes  We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver All Quiet on the Western Front/Erich Maria Remarque One by one the boys begin to fall...

In 1914 a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their schoolmaster to troop off to the 'glorious war'. With the fire and patriotism of youth they sign up. What follows is the moving story of a young 'unknown soldier' experiencing the horror and disillusionment of life in the trenches.

Themes: War, Masculinity, Memory, Trauma, Nationality

Suggested companion texts:  Regeneration by Pat Barker  Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks  Last Orders by Graham Swift  A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway  Catch 22 by Joseph Heller  Fall of Giants by Ken Follett

Voyage in the Dark/Jean Rhys It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known,' says Anna Morgan, eighteen years old and catapulted to England from the West Indies after the death of her beloved father. Working as a chorus girl, Anna drifts into the demi-monde of Edwardian London. But there, dismayed by the unfamiliar cold and greyness, she is absolutely alone and unconsciously floating from innocence to harsh experience. Her childish dreams have been replaced by the harsher reality of living in a man's world, where all charity has its price.

The reverse of a colonial narrative, this book looks at what happens when those flung to the far corners of the globe return home only to find it cold, strange and unwelcoming.

Themes: Gender, Sexuality, Society, Loss of Innocence

Suggested companion texts:  Fingersmith by Sarah Waters  The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath  Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy  The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns American Pastoral/Philip Roth ‘Swede’ Levov is living the American dream. He glides through life cocooned by his devoted family, his demanding yet highly rewarding (and lucrative) business, his sporting prowess, his good looks. He is the embodiment of thriving, post-war America, land of liberty and hope. Until the sunny day in 1968, when the Swede’s bountiful American luck deserts him. The tragedy springs from devastatingly close to home. His adored daughter, Merry, has become a stranger to him, a fanatical teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism that plunges the Levov family into the political mayhem of sixties America, and drags them into the underbelly of a seemingly ascendant society. Rendered powerless by the shocking turn of events, the Swede can only watch as his pastoral idyll is methodically torn apart.

Themes: American Dream, Family, War, Memory, Guilt, Religion

Suggested companion texts:  The Girls by Emma Cline  The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen  The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The God of Small Things/Arundhati Roy This is the story of Rahel and Estha, twins growing up among the banana vats and peppercorns of their blind grandmother’s factory, and amid scenes of political turbulence in Kerala. Armed only with the innocence of youth, they fashion a childhood in the shade of the wreck that is their family: their lonely, lovely mother, their beloved Uncle Chacko (pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher) and their sworn enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun, incumbent grand- aunt).

A deeply moving story about the barriers constructed by society, about how one person should not love another because of their station and about how we all break these rules for love.

Themes: Caste, Romantic Relationships, Race, Post-Colonialism, Time and Memory

Suggested companion texts:  Lowlands by Jhumpa Lahiri  The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri  Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand  Brick Lane by Monica Ali Midnight’s Children/ Salman Rushdie Born at the stroke of midnight at the exact moment of India's independence, Saleem Sinai is a special child. However, this coincidence of birth has consequences he is not prepared for: telepathic powers connect him with 1,000 other 'midnight's children' all of whom are endowed with unusual gifts. Inextricably linked to his nation, Saleem's story is a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirrors the course of modern India at its most impossible and glorious.

Themes: Magical Realism, Post-Colonialism, Class, Time, Race

Suggested companion texts:  The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy  The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai  Brick Lane by Monica Ali  Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai  Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter  Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

Persepolis/Mariane Satrapi “The story of a childhood and the story of a return.”

Persepolis is a graphic novel set against the back drop of Iran and its history. It paints a portrait of daily life, its struggles and triumphs and the bewildering contradictions between public and private life.

This book is about many things—history, politics, freedom, feminism, love, family, terror and much more.

Themes: Memory and Trauma, Growing Up, Religion, Gender

Suggested companion texts:  The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy  The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini  The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid  Call it Sleep by Henry Roth Requiem for a Dream/Hubert Selby Jr. Harry Goldfarb, heroin addict and son of lonely widow Sara, cares only about enjoying the good life with girlfriend Marion and best friend Tyrone C Love, and making the most of all the hash, poppers and dope they can get. Sara Goldfarb sits at home with the TV, dreaming of the life she could have and struggling with her own addictions - food and diet pills. But these four will pay a terrible price for the pleasures they believe they are entitled to. A passionate, heart-breaking tale of the crushing weight of hope and expectation, Requiem for a Dream is a dark modern-day fable of New York.

Themes: Drug Use, Hedonism, American Dream, Romantic Relationships

Suggested companion texts:  Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh  Jesus’s Son by Denis Johnson  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Frankenstein/Mary Shelley A Gothic masterpiece and one of the books that all pupils should read before they leave Marlborough College.

The tale is a superb blend of science fiction, mystery and thriller. Victor Frankenstein driven by the mad dream of creating his own creature, experiments with alchemy and science to build a monster stitched together from dead remains. Once the creature becomes a living breathing articulate entity, it turns on its maker and the novel darkens into tragedy. Although first published in 1818, Shelley’s masterpiece still maintains a strong grip on the imagination and has been the inspiration for numerous horror movies, television and stage adaptations.

Themes: The Gothic, Humanity, Creator/Creation, Relationships

Suggested companion texts:  The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole  Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe  Dracula by Bram Stoker  Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson  The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde We Need to Talk About Kevin/Lionel Shriver Eva never really wanted to be a mother; certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker and a teacher who tried to befriend him. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood and Kevin's horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her absent husband, Franklyn. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails.

Themes: Nature vs. Nurture, Motherhood, Mother/Child Relationships, Psychopathy

Suggested companion texts:  The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks  American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis  The Collector by John Fowles  The Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittall  My Sister Rosa by Justine Larbalestier

White Teeth/Zadie Smith One of the most talked about fictional debuts ever, White Teeth is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous must-read of a book.

Themes: Time, Migration, Generation Gaps, Culture Clash, Family

Suggested companion texts:  Family Life by Akhil Sharma  Brick Lane by Monica Ali  Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie  The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri  Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer  Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides  Accordion Crimes by Annie Proulx The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie/Muriel Spark Romantic, heroic, comic and tragic, unconventional schoolmistress Jean Brodie has become an iconic figure in post-war fiction. Her glamour, unconventional ideas and manipulative charm hold dangerous sway over her girls at the Marcia Blaine Academy - 'the crème de la crème' - who become the Brodie 'set', introduced to a privileged world of adult games that they will never forget.

Themes: Gender, Growing Up, Schooling, Sexuality, Innocence and Experience

Suggested companion texts:  The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen  Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf  Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov  Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Grapes of Wrath/John Steinbeck Set against the background of Dust Bowl Oklahoma and Californian migrant life, it tells of the Joad family, who, like thousands of others, are forced to travel west in search of the promised land. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires and broken dreams, yet out of their suffering Steinbeck created a drama that is intensely human, yet majestic in its scale and moral vision; an eloquent tribute to the endurance and dignity of the human spirit.

Themes: Class, Masculinity, Relationships, The Great Depression, American Dream

Suggested companion texts:  Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller  A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams  The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald  The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson  Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison  Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates  On the Road by Jack Kerouac Dracula/Bram Stoker When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula purchase a London house, he makes horrifying discoveries in his client's castle. Soon afterwards, disturbing incidents unfold in England: a ship runs aground on the shores of Whitby, its crew vanished; beautiful Lucy Westenra slowly succumbs to a mysterious, wasting illness, her blood drained away; and the lunatic Renfield raves about the imminent arrival of his 'master'. In the ensuing battle of wills between the sinister Count and a determined group of adversaries - led by the intrepid vampire hunter Abraham van Helsing - Bram Stoker created a masterpiece of the horror genre, probing into questions of identity, sanity and the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire.

Themes: The Gothic, Morality, Sexuality

Suggested companion texts:  Frankenstein by Mary Shelley  The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole  Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe  The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde  Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe

Vanity Fair/William Makepeace Thackeray Self-serving social climber and anti-heroine Becky Sharp will do anything to raise her status and attain wealth and standing with smart Society. Clever, lively and resourceful, orphan Becky is the total opposite of her naive and sentimental schoolmate Amelia Sedley, a pampered, yet good-natured girl from a wealthy family. As both women build lives for themselves in London, Thackeray decadently satirises the corruption and flaws of 19th-Century English Society.

Themes: High Society, Satire, Romantic Relationships

Suggested companion texts:  The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton  Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford  Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh  Emma by Jane Austen Brooklyn/Colm Toibin It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New York, Eilis knows she must go, leaving behind her family and her home for the first time.

Arriving in a crowded lodging house in Brooklyn, Eilis can only be reminded of what she has sacrificed. She is far from home - and homesick. And just as she takes tentative steps towards friendship, and perhaps something more, Eilis receives news which sends her back to Ireland. There she will be confronted by a terrible dilemma - a devastating choice between duty and one great love.

Themes: Family, Coming of Age, Memory and the Past, Romantic Relationships

Suggested companion texts:  Small Island by Andrea Levy  The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce  The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor

The Story of Lucy Gault/William Trevor Summer, 1921. Eight-year-old Lucy Gault clings to the glens and woods above Lahardane - the home her family is being forced to abandon. She knows the Gaults are no longer welcome in Ireland and that danger threatens. Lucy, however, is headstrong and decides that somehow she must force her parents into staying. But the path she chooses ends in disaster. One chance event, unwanted and unexpected, will blight the lives of the Gaults for years to come and bind each of them in different ways to this one moment in time, to this wild stretch of coast...

Themes: Loneliness, Romantic Relationships, Terrorism, Nation and Home

Suggested companion texts:  Brooklyn by Colm Toibin  Troubles by J. G. Farrell  Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd  by  Cal by Bernard MacLaverty Slaughterhouse 5/Kurt Vonnegut Prisoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller - these are the life roles of Billy Pilgrim, hero of this miraculously moving, bitter and funny story of innocence faced with apocalypse. Slaughterhouse 5 is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centring on the infamous fire- bombing of Dresden in the Second World War, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.

Themes: War, Memory, Morality, Masculinity, Freedom, Fate vs. Free Will

Suggested companion texts:  Catch 22 by Joseph Heller  Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks  White Teeth by Zadie Smith  One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest by Ken Kesey

The Colour Purple/Alice Walker Set in the deep American South between the wars, The Color Purple is the classic tale of Celie, a young black girl born into poverty and segregation. Raped repeatedly by the man she calls 'father', she has two children taken away from her, is separated from her beloved sister Nettie and is trapped into an ugly marriage. But then she meets the glamorous Shug Avery, singer and magic-maker - a woman who has taken charge of her own destiny. Gradually Celie discovers the power and joy of her own spirit, freeing her from her past and reuniting her with those she loves.

Themes: Gender, Race, Sexuality

Suggested companion texts:  The Help by Kathryn Stockett  Beloved by Toni Morrison  To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee  The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead  Native Son by Richard Wright  Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys  Corregidora by Gayl Jones Knowledge of Angels/Jill Paton Walsh It is, perhaps, the fifteenth century and the ordered tranquillity of a Mediterranean island is about to be shattered by the appearance of two outsiders: one, a castaway, plucked from by fishermen, whose beliefs represent a challenge to the established order; the other, a child abandoned by her mother and suckled by wolves, who knows nothing of the precarious relationship between Church and State but whose innocence will become the subject of a dangerous experiment.

This book questions the nature of belief and organised religion is a philosophical game of life and death.

Themes: Morality, Religion, Relationships, Feral Children

Suggested companion texts:  The Good Apprentice by  Paradise Lost by Joh Milton  Poetry of George Herbert

Fingersmith/Sarah Waters London 1862. Sue Trinder, orphaned at birth, grows up among petty thieves - fingersmiths - under the rough but loving care of Mrs Sucksby and her 'family'. But from the moment she draws breath, Sue's fate is linked to that of another orphan growing up in a gloomy mansion not too many miles away.

A fast paced and brilliantly plotted book. Unputdownable.

Themes: Gender, Sexuality, Victorian England, Class

Suggested companion texts:  Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens  The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue  Carol by Patricia Highsmith  Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson Brideshead Revisted/Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh's stunning novel of duty and desire set amongst the decadent, faded glory of the English aristocracy in the run-up to the Second World War.

The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian Flyte at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognise his spiritual and social distance from them.

Themes: Class, Relationships, Memory, Alcoholism, Friendship

Suggested companion texts:  Howard’s End by E.M. Forster  The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford  What a Carve Up by Jonathan Coe

Trainspotting/Irvine Welsh “Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total embarrassment tae the selfish, messed-up brats ye've produced. Choose life.” Irvine Welsh takes you through the darker side of Edinburgh street life.

Themes: Addiction, Hedonism, Escape, Violence, Class, Relationships

Suggested companion texts:  Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby Jr.  A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess  Cocaine Nights by J.G. Ballard The Picture of Dorian Gray/Oscar Wilde Wilde's only novel, first published in 1890, is a brilliantly designed puzzle, intended to tease conventional minds with its exploration of the myriad interrelationships between art, life, and consequence. From its provocative Preface, challenging the reader to believe in 'art for art's sake', to its sensational conclusion, the story self- consciously experiments with the notion of sin as an element of design. Yet Wilde himself underestimated the consequences of his experiment, and its capacity to outrage the Victorian establishment. Its words returned to haunt him in his court appearances in 1895, and he later recalled the 'note of doom' which runs like 'a purple thread' through its carefully crafted prose.

Themes: The Gothic, Evil, Hedonism, Morality, Sexuality

Suggested companion texts:  Dracula by Bram Stoker  Frankenstein by Mary Shelley  Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson  The Turn of the Screw by Henry James  Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe

Stoner/John Williams William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death his colleagues remember him rarely.

Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value. Stoner tells of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history, and reclaims the significance of an individual life. A reading experience like no other, itself a paean to the power of literature, it is a novel to be savoured.

Themes: Literature, Academia, Love, Meaning and Value of Life

Suggested companion texts:  Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates  The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro  Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf  The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides Oranges are not the only fruit/Jeanette Winterson This is the story of Jeanette, adopted and brought up by her mother as one of God's elect. Zealous and passionate, she seems seems destined for life as a missionary, but then she falls for one of her converts.

At sixteen, Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home and her family, for the young woman she loves. Innovative, punchy and tender,

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a few days ride into the bizarre outposts of religious excess and human obsession.

Themes: Religion, Sexuality, Gender, Growing Up, Mother/Daughter Relationships

Suggested companion texts:  The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall  Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin  Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters  Christopher and His Kind by Christopher Isherwood

Mrs Dalloway/Virginia Woolf On a June morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party and remembering her past. Elsewhere in London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Their days interweave and their lives converge as the party reaches its glittering climax. Here, Virginia Woolf perfected the interior monologue and the novel's lyricism and accessibility have made it one of her most popular works.

Themes: Time, Intersecting Lives, Gender, Class, Mental Illness, Relationships

Suggested companion texts:  The Hours by Michael Cunningham  The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner  The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West  by Ian McEwan

Choose your own!

Is there a book you are dying to read but it’s not on the challenge? Why not go off trail?

Pick up to two books that are not on the challenge that you want to read and they will count towards your 10 book total, just make sure you have borrowed them from the library or they won’t count!

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